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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 9596" data-attributes="member: 22">10/Feb/83: KNOTS LANDING: Celebration v. 11/Feb/83 DALLAS: Requiem v. 11/Feb/83: FALCON CREST: Separate HeartsDeath stalks the women of Soap Land this week, claiming the lives of Rebecca Wentworth on DALLAS, Ciji Dunne on KNOTS LANDING and maybe even Julia on FALCON CREST. Despite this common theme, this week’s DALLAS and KNOTS start off very differently. When DALLAS begins, Rebecca is already undergoing emergency surgery, bells tolling ominously on the soundtrack, whereas KNOTS opens to the optimistic sound of Ciji’s “New Romance (It’s A Mystery)” while Ciji herself cycles along the street, a big smile on her face.Back on DALLAS, Pam and assorted Ewings wait anxiously at the hospital while Afton tries to track down Cliff, who is out on a Gary-like bender, oblivious to his mother’s condition. "I've left messages for him everywhere,” she frets. Afton isn’t the only blonde woman in the Ewing-verse searching for a drunken man. Both Abby and Val spend much of this week’s KNOTS searching for Gary, each separately winding up at Ciji’s apartment where a bitter shouting match ensues.With the whole of “Celebration" building up to the reveal of Ciji’s body, the ep follows the Soap Land convention that began with “Who shot JR?” on DALLAS, (and continued with the shooting of Michael Tyrone in FLAMINGO ROAD, the kidnapping of Little Blake on DYNASTY and the killing of Carlo Agretti on FALCON CREST) whereby several characters are positioned as potential murder (or kidnapping) suspects. By KNOTS’ own standards, this feels a tad schematic, but it’s still pretty exciting. Both Richard Avery and Val are seen physically attacking Ciji, while Abby threatens her verbally: “You don’t wanna make me angry ..." “What are you gonna do, Abby, kill me?” responds Ciji mockingly. Ciji also does some threatening of her own. “I’m gonna tell the whole world how Tony Fenice goes around beating up old ladies,” she promises Chip.There aren’t as many threats in this week’s DALLAS - with Rebecca dying a third of the way through the episode, the characters are understandably subdued - at least not until Katherine Wentworth shows up. “You’re the one who caused Mama’s death and I’ll make you pay for it!” she vows to brother Cliff.Katherine isn’t the only Soap Land returnee. FALCON CREST’s Emma is fresh back from Houston, (the same place Rebecca was headed when her plane was hit) and likewise shares a scene with her half-brother, Richard Channing. Their meeting is less acrimonious than Katherine’s was with Cliff, however. She thanks him for the flowers he sent during her stay at the Soap Land Sanatarium (one likes to imagine fellow inmate Claudia Blaisdel stopping by her room to admire them) and he offers her a job as the New Globe’s troubleshooter. The way Richard is able to empathise so soulfully with Emma’s fragility one minute, before casually explaining to Miss Hunter that he will simply be using her to spy on the goings on at Falcon Crest the next, is one of those 180-degree shifts that make him such a great character.The titles of this week’s Ewing-verse episodes, “Celebration” and “Requiem”, refer to two contrasting events - a party at Daniel’s to mark the launch of Ciji's debut album and a funeral to commemorate Rebecca. While Gary, Richard and Ciji herself are all conspicuously absent from the party, the turnout for the funeral is quite impressive, with everyone who’s anyone in the Texas oil community gathering to pay their respects. (There is one notable exception: “At least JR had the decency to stay away from Rebecca's funeral,” notes Clayton.) The two events do have something in common, however - an unexpected sense of religiosity. Prior to the party, Richard surveys his restaurant, where a large blown up image of Ciji's face now takes pride of place. “Looks like some damn cathedral to her - Santa Ciji,” he says bitterly. This celestial theme carries over into FALCON CREST where Cole hears Linda Caproni playing Chopin on a music store piano and describes it as "a religious experience.”A sense of disillusionment creeps into Soap Land this week as various characters start to realise that the price for the success they have been craving all season is too high. When Richard complains about Ciji turning his restaurant into a nightclub on KNOTS, Abby reminds him that without her, "this place would have been bankrupt a long time ago.” "And I would have been better off," he retorts, “and you know something? So would you.” Later on, he tells Abby flatly: “I don’t care about business. You can foreclose, you can burn me up, you can sue me.” His words are echoed by Nick Hogan in FALCON CREST when he decides he cannot accept Richard Channing’s bribe: “I have to live with myself. That’s more important than your job."Meanwhile, on DALLAS, Bobby’s blackmail of George Hicks pays off when JR’s variance is rescinded, but as he points out to Donna, “it came one day too late to save Rebecca.” Donna is in no mood to celebrate the victory either. “It’s kind of hard to get too excited about anything. I keep thinking about Rebecca.” The one Ewingverse character who doesn’t appear to have gotten the memo that power and money are no longer the be all and end all is Sue Ellen, who behaves as if the loss of JR's variance were on a par with Rebecca’s death. This prompts Miss Ellie to deliver the speech which seems so eerily prophetic now: "Think ahead, Sue Ellen. Think twenty-five or thirty years ahead. I won't be here then and the fight won't be between JR and Bobby, it'll be between John Ross and Christopher … Where will this all end?” (At the time of writing, when it will end is the more pressing question. Waiting to hear whether or not New DALLAS is to have a fourth season, I feel like Pam and Bobby while Rebecca is in surgery, hoping for the best while bracing themselves for the worst.)Away from business, Pam also gets what she’s been after for a long time. Not only does Bobby show that he’s willing to put their marriage first by taking time off work to be with her, he even tells her that he’s prepared to leave Southfork if that’s what she wants - but again, it all comes too late. "I want to leave alone,” she tells him at the end of the episode. Pam isn’t the only character with itchy feet. “It looks like Chip is gonna be moving to New York pretty soon and when he does, I’m gonna go with him,” Diana informs her mother on KNOTS. From the grim expressions on their faces, it’s hard to tell who is the more dismayed: Bobby or Karen.Having left her husband a week ago, FALCON CREST’s Maggie is an episode ahead of Pam. While Katherine immediately becomes Pam’s confidante, Julia is quick to offer support to both Maggie and Chase, even offering to assist the latter with his enquiries in Carlo Agretti’s death. In hindsight, both Katherine's and Julia’s “support” is ironic, given how much of a vested interest they have in the respective outcomes of Pam and Bobby’s marriage problems and Chase’s murder investigation.KNOTS LANDING’s Karen and FALCON CREST’s Julia each invoke the wisdom of a significant cultural figure of the twentieth-century this week - Pablo Picasso and Agatha Christie respectively. "He was a very intelligent man, Picasso,” Karen informs Val. “Once a painting was finished, he never went back to it, no matter what anybody else said ... He was so consumed with life and the seeking of fresh horizons that he simply never looked back. The past was dead even before his paints were dry.” This is Karen’s not very subtle of way of telling Val to move on from Gary. Julia, meanwhile, earnestly informs Chase that “in every one of these Agatha Christie mysteries, the murderer is someone in plain sight, someone practically asking the world to discover them, but no one would listen.” Chase is polite but clearly fails to see how Julia’s observation can aid his investigation. In retrospect, Julia’s little speech is a deliciously brazen move, both on the part of the character and FALCON CREST itself.Two other couples reaching the end of the road this week: the Averys on KNOTS LANDING and the Hogans on FALCON CREST. In very similar bedroom scenes, Laura and Nick urge their respective spouses to face the sad truth. “It's over … why don’t you just admit it?” Laura asks Richard. “I don’t wanna keep pretending everything’s all right between us … Deep down we both want this divorce,” Nick tells Sheila. Neither Richard nor Sheila agrees. “I’ve given everything I have to this marriage!” Richard protests. "You’d throw away everything we have, just like that?” echoes Sheila. "We tried and we failed,” Laura insists, standing firm. “There’s nothing left,” agrees Nick.Scenes between Nick and Sheila Hogan have been few and far between on FALCON CREST, but whenever we do check in with them, they feel like such fully realised couple that it’s not hard to imagine the scenes from their marriage taking place on Seaview Circle, just a couple of doors down from the Mackenzies and Ewings. For some reason, their disharmonious relationship strikes the same melancholic chord for me as the couples in Abba’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You” video - maybe it’s something to do with Sheila’s remote, chilly (even Scandinavian?) persona or the fact that we rarely see them together outside their marital home (“Walking through an empty house … In these old familiar rooms …” etc.)Nick Hogan aside, the folk on FALCON CREST haven’t lost their appetite for scheming the way some in the Ewing-verse have. This week, Phillip Erickson double-crosses Angela by joining forces with Richard Channing, while Lance and Melissa form an alliance against both his mother and grandmother. Sensing Lance might be having second thoughts about executing whatever plan they’ve devised, Melissa drips poison in his ear, urging him on. “We’ll never get what we want if we wallow in sentiment," she hisses. "Don’t let petty guilt hang you up.” The femme fatale is becoming Lady Macbeth. It’s all very juicy.Watching this week’s episode of KNOTS, I’m struck for the first time by the way the Wards’ story comes full circle. When the series began, Ginger resented how preoccupied with the music business Kenny was. Now she’s the one who urges him to return to it: “You have a life to live and a family to take care of and a gigantic talent you’re letting go to waste."Similarly, when Ciji fails to show up for her party, we see Kenny’s face as Ginger takes her place on stage and he realises what’s been under his nose all this time. After four years of playing second fiddle to the rest of the women on KNOTS, this is Ginger's (and Kim Lankford’s) big moment and she makes the most of it, tearing into an unremarkable ballad and elevating it by the strength of her performance. Among all the disillusionment and cynicism in this week’s Soap Land, this a touching, validating moment for the Wards ... but where does it leave Ciji?Rebecca Wentworth’s deathbed farewell is the second such scene of the season. Where Cecil Colby ranted to his new bride about his hatred for Blake and his wish for her to continue their feud, Rebecca tearfully bids adieu to her “good girl” and makes Pam promise to take care of Cliff. However dramatic and poignant it might be, Rebecca’s death scene also has a traditional Hollywood glow about it. Despite enduring a plane crash and major surgery, her makeup is still intact, and she manages to exchange “I love you”s with Pam just before flatlining. What happens to Ciji on KNOTS feels a lot stranger and more disorientating.As Ginger sings, the enlarged photo of Ciji serving as a backdrop, one is reminded of Richard’s crack about the restaurant being a cathedral to Ciji. Indeed, there is something symbolic about her blue eyes watching solemnly over the proceedings, as if this were already her funeral and she had been transformed into a sort of guardian angel.From this image of Ciji, the screen cuts abruptly to a shaky shot of the tide rolling in on the beach, Ginger’s voice still singing on the soundtrack. It’s night, the shot is very dark and it takes a moment for us to adjust - what exactly are we meant to be seeing? Before we can get our bearings, we cut back to Ginger, her face now obscuring the image of Ciji as she builds up to the climax of the song, Kenny’s proud face watching. We cut back to the ocean again - there’s a glimpse of something bobbing in the water - then back to Ginger singing the heck out of that song and various reaction shots from the rest of the characters in attendance. Then as the song concludes, the camera moves past Ginger to rest once more on the still image of Ciji behind her. There’s a slow cross-fade back to the ocean, the sound of waves crashing against the rocks, and the same eerie “Swan Song” music that played over Afton’s mystery phone call near the end of last week’s DALLAS. As the camera pans across the shore, the screen goes very dark, almost black, for a few seconds before picking out the wet, blue-tinged face of a young woman. Is that …? And is she … ? Yes and yes - it's Ciji, not as a rock angel in a photo this time, but a corpse washed up by an ocean full of danger and mystery.To me, it feels there's a direct line between Ciji’s death on KNOTS, Laura Palmer's on TWIN PEAKS and now Lucy Beale’s in EASTENDERS - a lineage of slain soap girls - all pretty, all blonde, all ultimately unknowable, just out of our reach. (The only three biographical facts we ever learn about Ciji - that she was twenty-six, came from Kentucky and left home at fifteen after falling out with her parents - were finally revealed in the episode before this one.) Nonetheless, all three fictional deaths have a strange power to move - as if each girl is more an avatar of loss, a conduit for grief, than a real, knowable person.There’s yet more death - possibly - at the end of this week’s FALCON CREST, with the discovery of Julia’s car at the bottom of a cliff. Like Rebecca’s midair collision at the end of last week’s DALLAS, the crash itself happens offscreen, but here at least we get to see the fiery aftermath as the car bursts into flames in front of Chase and Cole.And this week’s Soap Land Top 3 are …1 (1) KNOTS LANDING2 (4) FALCON CREST3 (2) DALLAS</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?